


disassociated knowledge

by Chronolith



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Allura (Voltron)-centric, Body Horror, Cthulhu Mythos, Gen, Horrorterrors - Freeform, Mindfuck, gentle horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-09
Updated: 2018-08-09
Packaged: 2019-06-24 14:03:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15632154
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chronolith/pseuds/Chronolith
Summary: Allura goes to Oriande and comes back changed. This is a fact.I keep calling Allura my wonderterror girl. Let's play that straight.





	disassociated knowledge

_elle est retrouvée._  
_Quoi? – L’Eternité_  
_C’est la mer allée_  
_Avec le soleil._  
- _L’Eternité_ , Arthur Rimbaud 1873

Allura goes to Oriande and comes back changed. This is a fact.

She learns the secrets of Altean alchemy, follows her father’s footsteps, comes back with the song of the universe humming in her every word. Alfor had gone to Oriande and come back with the knowledge of the Lions of Voltron written into the very fiber of his soul. It was a holy gift and now Allura has it too, burnt into the marrow of her bones. 

Coran explains this to them. This is history. It does tend to repeat.

Oriande picks out its Chosen, paints them in star dust and fever dreams, plants seeds of the impossible in their souls and then lets them out into the finite-but-infinitely-expanding universe and they _burn_.

She lays her hands on the Castle’s controls like a benediction and the entire ship trembles--rousing out of hibernation for the first time in eons. It throws off its somnolent inertness at her command, thrumming with eager alertness. The universe spills out before them, endless and shining between her fingers, all things are rendered possible in her slender hands.

Coran closes his eyes as Allura laughs, the silvered sound shivering through the Castle’s haunted halls, and wills himself to forget the path paradise.

He forgot it once before, he can do it again. There are somethings that you can only live with once forgotten.

* * *

The wolf doesn’t like Allura.

No one quite knows what to do with that. Pidge grunts, shoves at the mass of fur and sad, sad puppy eyes that occupies her lap and asks if Allura can teach her the trick. Lance tosses a piece of bloody meat, tiny droplets of blood hanging fat and round in the low gravity, that Keith’s wolf snaps out of the air with quick, economical movements, and laughs. He teases both Keith and Allura about it until Hunk sends him to scrub pots. Shiro says Cosmo is just shy, just needs time, and will open up with careful patience. After all, patience yields focus—or puppy snuggles, as the case may be.

Allura is sad. Holds her hand low to the side for the wolf to sniff, fingers curled in, body angled away to show she’s no threat. Keeps her voice low and sweet. It makes no difference. Keith’s wolf whines, flicks its ears back tight to its skull, belly crawls if forced to be near her. Shows its throat. Shivers all along its rangy body. Makes itself small, small, small and so submissive. And Allura is sad.

“It just recognizes who is top bitch around,” Lance laughs and smirks, sharp and indolent at Keith. He’s an insolent slouch of a boy against Keith’s former lion, all long lean lines and casual sarcasm. 

Keith doesn’t know what to make of it (he’s never known what to make of Lance) and just shrugs. 

Keith’s wolf doesn’t like Allura.

* * *

They are nine people, one teleporting wolf, one cow, and four telepathic mice in five semi-sentient lions floating in the void of space. It gives one a lot of time to think.

Ask Hunk what he thinks about, alone in his lion in the dark, and he’ll shrug off the question saying something about theoretical particle physics. He’ll curl his shoulders inward, like he’s making himself a smaller target, and keep his eyes fixed on the readout that tells him how many lightyears he is from home.

Ask him again.

Give him a drink, something sweet and warm that could _almost_ be from home, and ask him—

_What do you think about, alone in the dark—_

Hunk’ll look at you hard. He’ll sigh, and then he’ll lean in close. He’ll tell you a story.

“Have you heard of Nafanua? She was a princess of the Sā Tonumaipe’ā and a goddess—there are, well doesn’t matter, there are a lot of stories, but the important one is when she came to free Falealupo—my village, actually—because her uncle had been captured and forced to climb up a coconut tree upside down, look I’m just telling you like my tinamatua told me, and she had help from a pair of twins named Matuna, yes both of them—“

Then he’ll stop, suddenly fretful. He’ll look left and right, rub at his mouth.

“Nafanua, she was wise and she was kind, but she told the Matuna not to cross over to her side of the road while they were fighting. They had to stay far away.”

This is where you get a premonition of where this story will go, and why he’s telling it to you.

“Only they _did_ run across the road—no one sees what happens, but at the end of the fighting they were found turned to stone.”

Ask him why he tells you this story and he’ll frown.

“Well, Allura is a princess and...” he’ll look down and rub at his mouth again, pull his hairband free to rake nervous fingers through his hair, and fidget. “And something else, too.”

* * *

“Is she always,” Romelle pauses, tries to keep her shoulders from hunching, “so … _intense?_ ”

The question hovers between them like a fragile moth because the question Romelle really wants to ask refuses to come out of her mouth—gets wedged in her throat like a rock and she chokes on it.

Hunk’s eyes cut to her for a moment and he grunts, low and thoughtful. “She’s the leader of the Coalition,” he says after a beat, but Romelle notes the way his hands shake, just for a second, while peeling the little vegetables he throws in the pot. “I think she has to be intense.”

Romelle makes a disgusted noise. “That’s not. I mean,” the words die in her throat and she waves her hands. _She burns_ , Romelle wants to say. _A supernova burns less than her_. But there’s a block in her throat like a fist and the words won’t come. “She’s … not like anyone else.”

“She’s awesome,” Lance sighs from where he’s sprawled across the paw of Hunk’s lion.

Romelle considers this. It is true: Allura inspires awe.

It’s the type of awe that Romelle feels at the edge of a black hole’s event horizon, at the flickering birth of a star—the sublime beauty of the universe’s most destructive/creative forces. You stare in mute wonder, and then you run, you run until your lungs seize and your legs give out, you run before the shockwave’s edge swallows you whole.

She’d watched the Princess of their dead and forgotten people turn on Lotor—their supposed savior—and scream with a thousand voices: _traitor_ , shriek _betrayer_ , wail with all the voices of the dreaming dead _you would dare_ , and then Romelle had turned her face away.

Lotor’s body may have survived that encounter, but Romelle’s not sure his mind did. Not sure Allura hadn’t reached in with flaming claws and torn his soul asunder in her outrage.

Then that slender, dark skinned monstrosity had greeted her with gentle hands, and wings, and a thousand midnight tendrils—called her sister with the voice of planet’s billions of dead, all warped and shattering.

The universe had writhed at the edges where the monster, the Princess-- _her_ Princess—touched it. “I have waited,” Allura had breathed, and her joy was breathtaking, “to meet you.”

Romelle had trembled where Allura caught her, caged between slim hands that were wings, that were tentacles, that were slivers of the void, and did the one thing one could at a moment like that: she’d fainted dead away.

She’d woken awash in soft blue light with a song trembling against her skin.

Allura’d greeted her with crooning concern and eyes like the center of a neutron star—Romelle had sobbed, had wailed, had considered the refuge of going completely mad.

“She’s … something,” Romelle says, because she doesn’t know how to say: _she’s the monster in the void_ , doesn’t know how to say: _she burns with starlight_ , doesn’t know how to say: _sanity dies in her eyes_.

Lance rolls to his feet with a sort of boneless grace that makes her frown every time.

He sidles into her space, sly and insinuating, he catches up her hands in his, stares into her eyes like he can see inside her head and croons: “You’re afraid of her.”

She can only nod, struck mute by the look in his eyes.

His smile is a horror. “Good,” he says simply, “You should be.”

* * *

He can’t seem to find his equilibrium with the other paladins. Something’s always a little off. A new tension that trembles between them in the lion bond—like a great beast moving under dark water. He asks, of course he does, what happened while he was with the Blade, while he hunted Lotor’s lies to the edges of the universe. 

The answer he gets makes little sense: Allura went to Oriande and came back changed, but she smiles at him all the same—sweet and fond.

It’s been a long time, Keith tells himself, since he’s seen them, and he’s never fit comfortably anywhere except at Shiro’s side. It makes sense that a feeling of unease follows him like a ghost in a graveyard, haunting his every step. He tells himself the feeling that he’s missing something ( _there’s something in the water_ ) is just the old discomfort come back with a vengeance. 

After two years on the back of a space whale traveling between vortexes that warped the very fabric of space-time itself it’s not surprising that he’s forgotten the trick of existing with other people.

This is what he tells himself and take tally of the other paladins:

—Lance grates the same as he ever did—too loud, too sharp, and now with a sly, insinuating edge to his words that makes Keith’s vision haze red in ways it hasn’t in years. (Lance calls him _samurai_ ; calls him _space ninja_ ; calls him _Dear Leader_ in a tone too soft to be insulting and too sharp to be affectionate and Keith doesn’t know what to make of it.) Keith avoids Lance, and Lance lets him.

—Pidge is a livewire wrought into the form of a teenage girl—all nervous energy and lightning flashes of insight that leaves him feeling like he’s drowning on dry land. They respect each other, too similar not to with their sharp edges and barely contained energy, but they don’t understand each other.

—Hunk is steady, is calm, is quietly sarcastic in ways that always catches Keith off guard, startling him into laughter. It’s easy to simply _be_ around Hunk in ways that seem impossible around his best friend. The way they exist as polar opposites is a thing that Keith will never fully fathom.

…Allura…

Romelle adores Allura. 

‘Adore’, Keith remembers in an odd flash of bored high school classes, comes from the Latin _ad orare_. To worship. To venerate. To hold in exultation. And there’s something in the way Romelle watches Allura with huge, uncertain eyes that leaves Keith cold. 

“She … shines,” Romelle whispers, her voice small and trembling as if she’s afraid someone will hear. Keith has to lean in to catch the words. “And it hurts to look at her. Sometimes.”

There’s a universe worth of tensions between the two girls—the Princess and the rebel—and even Keith can see them like the eddies of solar wind.

_(Sometimes she shines, and it hurts to look at her.)_

* * *

They form Voltron.

The battle is hectic—it always is—desperate, and fierce exultation sweeps through them, the taste of blood in their teeth, the universe hanging fat and full for them to take great, gulping bites out of.

There’s the impression of slender hands sunk deep in living flesh, pulling out thick, dripping chunks.

Keith shudders at the feeling, swallows hard against the nausea and the hunger, and tries not to feel too grateful when they can drop the connection.

* * *

Lance dreams that he is walking through the Castle, the corridors strung with decorations that glitter in the low light—only there are no guests, just silence and the smell of ozone, because the Castle rocks with the echoes of explosions and the halls are lit with the flickers of emergency beacons guiding him through sputtering electrical fires and over tumbled support struts that jut from the walls like broken bones.

He smacks his palm to lock after lock, fidgeting impatiently at each threshold as the door slides open with a whisper only to turn away from each door with an impatient snarl.

( _this isn’t the Castle—this is a fucking labyrinth, twisting in on itself endlessly_ )

There’s a low croon, like an off-key lullaby, winding through the corridors and his skin prickles at the sound—his faulty, flickering sense of self-preservation tells him to _stay away_ from that song, to turn around, go back. This is not for him and he should not be here.

But Lance and his sense of self-preservation have always had a rocky relationship.

There’s a figure on the observation deck, form blotting out the void between stars—a massive, roiling blue-white sheen of energy shivering in the dark with wings that stretch, stretch, stretch to the ceiling and eyes the blink and burn as they stare. The song that spills from her mouth—so wide and dark and full of rank after rank of serrated teeth like a shark—raises the hair on the back of his neck.

It turns as the last note shivers in the air—collapses inward like a dying star, goes dark, goes cold, and Allura walks towards him, swaying with the solar winds.

“Lance,” she sighs like he’s kept her waiting. 

He catches her hands as she reaches towards him—burning cold and smooth as silk—presses kisses to each of her knuckles.

“Do you sing?” She asks—her eyes glisten with blue-white light like the center of a neutron star.

He grins at her, sharp and delighted. “I like your songs better.”


End file.
